Where do we go from here?

“Where do we go from here, now that all of the children have grown up…” - The Alan Parsons Project, 1981

The lyric snippet above is not from one of my favourite songs or musical artists, but it kept running (and romping) through my head anyway as I pondered the end of this course and the beginning of my future as an educational technology learner/teacher/enthusiast. Well, I’m not necessarily a fully mature digital adult yet, but I’d say I’ve grown up a bit during this course.


Where do I go from here? Well, I’ve contacted a couple of colleagues in my school, including the tech guru, to try to spark more excitement about Web 2.0, see what’s workable, find out what I’ve missed in my back yard. Mr. School technology has informed me that a Moodle was created to stoke edu-tech fires, so I should be able to login to that in the upcoming week. I would be extremely dissatisfied if I was unable to set some wheels in motion on a school level, so I’ll work with those who are already online to help spread the Web 2.0 love.

What about my own development – how have I done so far and how do how do keep it up and take it to the next level? One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that you don’t know how ignorant you are until you know how much you don’t know (doesn’t that sound like Yogi Berra?); in that respect, my edu-blogging journey has been an absolute success. I never guessed that such a fantastic array of ideas and tools would be available, only a few keystrokes away.

I started off hoping to go from “technological infancy to a techno-toddler (and then teenager!) in a relatively short period” (from my first post), which I may have accomplished – I’ll have to check my teacher-librarian candidate stages of growth timeline. When I look at my first blogs, I see a writer who is struggling with new technology as well as expressing his own ideas about Web 2.0 tools that were being explored. Complaints about another person’s technical difficulties do not make for interesting reading, so I’m glad to see that I have mostly curtailed that annoying habit. I have also become much better at learning how to use new applications as well as finding information about possible educational uses for those apps. My first few blogs were lame – no useful links, superficial commentary or analysis, no evidence of serious thinking, void of personality or character. I feel like I’ve started to move forward as far as all of those problems are concerned.

Perhaps the best aspect of this course was the opportunity to read/write/dialogue with classmates – it was inspiring to see those who are much farther along in teacher-librarianship and educational technology as well as those who seem to have been a little closer to my level of learning. But as useful as Delicious and RSS feeds can be, it takes other people with similar interests to forward some amazing links and put forward some fantastic ideas, and that’s why I hope some of us can still find the time to keep it up. I was at a Special Area Group session (provincial professional development day) recently, and saw one of our peer’s work being referenced - way to go jatacadia (Jo-Anne)! I wish I could point out more specific references to things I’ve learned from my classmates, but they would range from adding a cool app like Shelfari to pointing out cool links that I’d missed. The fast pace of this course meant that I was just able to check out the sites shared on Delicious, but not to keep track of who aimed me there in the first place.

My school’s tech guy has been forwarding some interesting articles that are inspiring me to continue exploring many of the concepts we have explored for this course. “Kids gain valuable skills from time online” (found at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/19/BUKE147TA1.DTL) is a nice short article focusing on pros and cons of youngsters and their use of computer time. The article stems from Living and Learning With New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf), a 58-page paper which looks like fodder for anyone interested in edu-tech. Of particular note may be the section entitled Genres of Participation with New Media, with key phrases being Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. The next questions seem obvious; where do our students fit into concerning those three terms? Where are we as educators and Web 2.0 participants?

Another thought-provoking article, “Is Technology Rewiring our Brains?” by Gary Small, M.D. and Gigi Vorgan spotlights Digital Natives and how new online tools may be changing things more than we think (http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977496300). Small and Vorgan have written a book entitled ibrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind that looks intriguing.



Although my school technology expert has stated that he is simply pointing out articles of interest and not trying to start dialogue, I’m hoping that conversations start anyway so I can continue the kind of healthy discussions we’ve been enjoying in this course.

I’m sharing “Is Technology Rewiring our Brains” with my students in a media literacy unit this week as I begin to use the things we’ve learned in this course in earnest. I can’t wait.